Minutes of Meetings with God
and with Myself

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Just Kind of Sad

"Christmas is just kind of sad." That's the way the conversation in the car began as three of us returned from Thanksgiving dinner with family. The comment came as we noted how many Christmas lights had appeared outside of houses and businesses on Thanksgiving Day. Obviously, people were get-ting ready for the mad dash to Christmas.

My wife's reply to the comment was: "Yes, yes, it is. It can be a mix." "Good!" said the other person, "at least I'm not alone."

Somehow, we've managed to lead ourselves to believe that Christmas should be the happiest time of the year for everyone, everywhere. And lots of times, Christmas is just kind of sad. Lots of times, Christmas is just a real mix. Sadly, lots of times we try to make Christmas so perfect that we make our-selves and everyone around us miserable.

The winter holidays are supposed to be joyous times, but for so many of us, Thanksgiving and Christmas rub our noses in how needy, desperate, and very human we are. Even if we are "well off" financially, it's all too easy to find ourselves terribly down either emotionally or spiritually during the holidays. Doing good things, being generous or helping others, can become exhausting. The "Season," instead of being energizing, becomes some thing of a "blackhole" that sucks everything out of us.

The day before Thanksgiving, we wrapped up our efforts in the community to reach out to our neighbors who otherwise wouldn't have much for Thanksgiving. Church folks arranged for a turkey, dressing, loaves of bread, pies, canned vegetables, yams, potatoes and other "traditional" Thanksgiving foods for 80 or more families in and around the community. United Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, Assemblies of God, and Catholics all pitched in to make things happen. It felt good to help our neighbors in very concrete ways. I came away from the experience both exhilarated and exhausted. I went home, ate and fell asleep on the couch (totally forgetting about a study I had planned to lead in the evening).

I had occasion to talk to someone just the other day who said that thoughts of suicide had pressed him hard and sleeplessness plagued him as we approached the holidays. This is a person who is otherwise doing well and who mostly focuses on helping others. However, the holidays worked mostly to add to this fine person's struggles.

At a worship service, I spoke briefly with a person whose brother had died suddenly. The person suffered a flood of loneliness because now, she is the only one left of her core family; her parents and all her siblings have died. Another person really wasn't looking forward to the holidays, because it would mark the first anniversary of her spouse's death.

Whether because we feel simply too rushed and overwhelmed by the flood of family and holiday activities, because we feel burdened with renewed grief because the holiday will be spent without someone we love, because we feel so terribly alone and lonely for reasons we don't understand, or because we basically feel so far from perfect that life doesn't feel worth living, Christmas can be just kind of sad.

Christmas has been just kind of sad from the very beginning. And, Christmas has been sad because, from the very beginning, it has been so very human. We tend to focus on the God stuff when we tell the Christmas story, the real Christmas story. We talk about angels, immaculate conceptions, stars and precious gifts. That is all well and good. It makes us feel good.

What we forget is, everything about Christmas happened in real life, to real people. The world of the first Christmas was plagued with disease, war, poverty and violence that were so bad, that we live in a paradise by comparison. Things were so bad, everywhere, that many people expected that God would come, wipe out the whole human race with the exception of a few, and start all over. In the world of the first Christmas, "last day" communities were springing up in which people sold everything they had, and went to desolate places to wait for God to arrive.

It's safe to say that almost everything in the human condition was stacked against the first Christmas happening. Had it been left completely to human beings, the first Christmas never would have happened.

What is amazing about Christmas is: God worked through suffering, confused, willful human beings to make the impossible, possible. At each step of the way toward the first Christmas, God transformed improbable and impossible human beings, relation-ships, and circumstances into the vital elements of the most important event in human history.

God picked an unmarried girl, who may have been as young as 12, to carry a unique child who would bridge the abyss between the divine and the human. This child would accomplish the "at-one-ment" of God and humanity. God would convince the very devout (but very unwilling) man in the girl's life to marry her, and care for both her and her child. In a day when death in childbirth was a very real danger for both mother and infant even in the best of circumstances, both survived and thrived in the worst possible conditions.

There are things we forget about the first Christmas that we desperately need to remember. The first Christmas was fraught with doubt, spiritual as well as emotional and physical suffering, danger, confusion, and terrible uncertainty. The first Christmas wasn't fun. No one was rushing to get in line to do it all again.

A weary girl, suddenly a woman, turned away from comfortable lodging to sleep with the working animals (probably camels, oxen, donkeys, goats), gave birth to a child amid the stink of a stable. There is no record of a mid-wife, so she may have had little or no help unless her husband had lent a hand.

There was and is nothing romantic about it. Some angels, a small number of shepherds, and a few "Wise Men" were the only ones who took note of the birth. All those folks who were waiting for God to come and start over missed it. Christmas was and is just kind of sad.

The message of Christmas is not: "You are supposed to be happy!" It is: "In the middle of this mixed-up mess, God has arrived!" We are not alone.